Motorola’s former CEO reveals the true nature of the original Nexus 6 dimple

The “dimple” that could have been is sadly superior to the one that was put in.

You’ve really got to hand it to them: thanks to Apple and Samsung, fingerprint sensors are all the rage right now. The bio-metric security element, which is sadly not enough to deter someone who is determined from accessing your device, is so in these days that even Google/Motorola had planned to include one on the eternally short-supplied Nexus 6.

In an interview with The Telegraph, former Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside spilled the beans on the back: the dimple on the Nexus 6 was originally meant to contain a fingerprint sensor that was removed at the last minute due to what one might assume was quality issues (something that a few owners might argue is still a problem). Specifically, “The secret behind [the dimple] is that it was supposed to be fingerprint recognition, and Applebought the best supplier. So the second best supplier was the only one available to everyone else in the industry and they weren’t there yet.” Oddly enough however – possibly to satiate those angry at the revelation -Mr. Woodside then goes on to say that “[the fingerprint sensor] wouldn’t have made that big a difference.”

One wonders just how often (if at all) this would have occurred on the Nexus 6 had things gone according to plan.

News of the dropped scanner confirms the report Ars Technica had last month, when it was discovered that Shamu originally contained source code for the added security feature. With this new admission of the AWOL component, we begin to see an interesting layer to Android that Google had previously not publicly proclaimed. At the very least, the inclusion of a fingerprint sensor would have inadvertently served to justify Samsung’s love affair with the technology.

What do you think, do you wish Google and Motorola had went ahead with a fingerprint scanner or glad it didn’t make the cut?